Yesterday, I used my new rice cooker for the first time and instead of cooking rice in it, I baked a chocolate cake! Yes! I BAKED a cake in it – not steamed, not boiled 😆

I had followed a recipe that came with the rice cooker and I wasn’t really having any great expectations of a cake baked in a rice cooker, but I was really amazed by the light and fluffy cake texture that was evenly cooked throughout – no burning, no hard bits at the bottom (as the heat in the rice cooker comes from the bottom)…a perfectly normal looking and tasting cake as we would have it if it were baked in an actual oven! 😯

All I did was prepare the cake batter in my mixer, pour it into the non-stick, greased rice pan, set the menu to “Cake” and the timing for the baking to 50 minutes and it was all set to go. When the cake was done, there was a beeping sound to tell me that the cake and the rice pan were ready to be removed from the rice cooker. I let them cool for 5 minutes and it was easy inverting the cake onto a plate. I did the chocolate fudge separately and I admit that I am not very good at spreading frosting, hence the dodgy picture! 😆

Like this:

Whooo….hoooo! This evening, I finally received my new kitchen toy – an electronic rice cooker! I am absolutely tickled by its features because I have been using a rather simple, straightforward 20 years’ old National brand electric rice cooker that just has an “On/Off” switch, but it has served me very well as it has never broke down at all. However, due to my growing family’s appetites (my children!), I needed a larger capacity rice cooker. So, at last yearend, when there were some points in our credit card to be redeemed for gifts, I had chosen this high-tech rice cooker and it took 3 weeks to be delivered to me. 😆

Call me behind times or something, but I had no idea that rice cookers can do so much nowadays. The new one I got now can even bake cakes and my daughter already made me promised to bake a cake in our brand new rice cooker tomorrow. So, this rice cooker’s first function my home since its manufacturing was not to cook rice, but to bake a cake! 🙄

Cake recipes for the rice cooker

The other functions are –

1) cook white rice

2) express cooking of white rice (I have to look into this as I am not sure how this would work)

3) cook rice porridge

4) it can cook slowly i.e. as a crockpot, up to 12 hours

5) steam food

I can’t wait til tomorrow to test my new toy out! I will let you know how my cake turns out……Good night! 😀

Ah, I have missed writing here for a few days now – I have been busy decluttering my children’s Study Room which was accumulating lots of junk…..then I decided to move their study tables to face different directions which are auspicious for maximising their learning and knowledge capabilities. Later, I will post a topic on finding your auspicious directions for success in your life (applying Feng Shui principles). 😉

Meanwhile, I went around the Net looking at more cute kitchen gadgets for the fun of it and I decided to post a few more of them here to interest you :-

Mmmmm Pizza! This is a great idea for blokes that don’t know how to use an oven but still want the holy challis of junk food, the Pizza. The pizza oven has only one purpose and that’s to cook big circular heavenly pizzas.

The oven can cook pizzas up to 12″ in diameter and as it’s heats from both above and below you should get a nice crispy base along with the stringy melted cheese on top.

This patented adjustable measuring cup set is easy to use and measures both liquid and dry ingredients. Simply slide the rubber knob to adjust the capacity to metric or imperial units. Magnets on the bottom allow them to attach to appliances for handy access. Dishwasher safe; disassembles for cleaning. Mini cup holds up to 2 tablespoons. Regular cup holds up to .5 cup.

Say you’ve just finished chopping up some tomatoes and hot chillies, you hands are covered in juices and hot chilli seeds. You could wipe your hands on the tea towel but you just know somebody will moan if you do that. You could carefully get a paper towel to wipe your hands on being careful to only touch the towel that you need OR you could get one of these “No-Touch” Paper Towel Dispenser and Cutter.The Point and Cut paper towel (or kitchen roll to us UKers) fits underneath on of your wall cabinets, to dispense paper you simply hold you hand in front of a sensor on the right. Once the desired amount of paper has rolled out you move your hand to the left and it automatically cuts it.

How many of us would love to have a trashcan that automatically opens when you need it. With the touchless trashcan you will never have to touch that dirty trashcan again and can throw away your eggshells and go right back to cooking.

I am a fanatic when it comes to washing my hands while I am cooking and when I have to keep touching the trashcan to throw things away that always doubles the time I spend washing my hands. With the touchless trashcan, I do not have to wash my hands quite as often as before.

The touchless trashcan has a built in artificial intelligent smart chip that knows the exact time to open and close so you never have to touch that dirty trash can again until it is full or time to take it out. It uses an invisible harmless infrared beam that when you hold your hand or trash within 6 inches of the lid and it will open up so you can discard the waste. It closes within 3 seconds of the time that you move your hand away.

I was looking at some cute kitchen timers and below you will find some funny gizmos – 😆

Hmmmm….., how many of you are like me? Absolutely crazy over cute and amazing kitchen gadgets? Whenever I go to the shopping malls, I don’t head for the fashion boutiques but for the household or kitchen outlets. Lucky for me, I have a good friend who has the same craze like me and we would go “window” shopping together going ga-ga over the kitchen gadgets, crockery, utensils, pots and pans on display. Or on those occasions that my husband is looking at his favourite electronic gadgets, he will know where to find me ===> in the household department! 🙄 😆

I have found some kitchen gadgets on the Internet and have posted them here as I am sure you would find them interesting as well. 😆 Please note that I am not advertising for the suppliers of these gadgets nor am I paid in any way to mention them! 😀

Butter Wizard

Butter, at least in my house, is kept in the fridge. Whenever you want to use some, you generally take it out, give it a few seconds in the microwave, and it’s good to go. I never thought that was a lot of work, but the Butter Wizard aims to help me be a little lazier. It’s self described as a temperature controlled butter dish. Any stick of butter you put into the Wizard will be kept at the temperature of your choosing so that when you finally go to butter that toast, you’ll be all set.

No need to wait for the butter to thaw before spreading it onto our bread. Sometimes, the butter even gets too soft for my liking! 🙄 Whenever plugged in, the wizard will charge itself up for when there’s no outlet around, then it can provide about 2 hours of perfect butter for your enjoyment. I’m serious, that’s pretty much everything the Butter Wizard does. Oh, almost forgot, it’s dishwasher safe too. That’s always important.

Hands-Free Can Opener

From personal experience, I know that using a traditional can opener to open a can takes way to long, and those under the cabinet ones look ugly and are tricky to use sometimes. It’s also a task for someone who is a bit older; they just don’t have the strength in them to do it.

This gadget is supposedly a hands free can opener. All you have to do is secure the opener on the can, hold a button for a second, and then the opener will travel around the can giving a clean cut. That means no sharp edges when it comes off, and the lid will come right off, there’s no pulling it and having half the contents come out on you.

Electric Ice Cream Scooper

When you want ice cream at home, you want it instantaneously. Waiting for the ice cream to thaw, while only taking minutes, seems like hours. Or….the scoop gets too messy and it is difficult to get the ice cream out of it nicely. 🙄 You’re just impatient, but there is a solution, the Electric Ice Cream Scooper! All your troubles are gone, at least the ones relating to ice cream. . .

It’s like any other high quality scooper, it’s made of metal that will scoop thawed ice cream easily. The real beauty is the electric part, the scooper actually heats up to make scooping that much easier, you could scoop at a entire galloon in minutes.
The rest of the features are pretty standard and boring. It’s got a nonstick surface, which makes cleaning simple, and a drip guard to make sure you don’t get any ice cream on your hands or shirt.

Tea Bag Timer

Ah, this is the perfect gadget for me as I am a serious tea drinker! 😆 There is a method of steeping the tea bag in hot water so that we get the perfect strength of tea….but I have never followed it and would just leave my tea bag in my mug. 🙄

The tea bag timer does what you’d expect with a bit of panache. You attach the tea bag to an arm which is lowered into the boiling water, set a timer for the required length of time you would like the brew to stew and when the time is up the arm lifts the tea bag from the cup leaving a perfect brew. Voila! 🙂

Hot Diggity Dogger

Do you love eating Hot Dogs? If so you might be interested in the Hot Diggity Dogger, a toaster that has holes for the Hot Dogs’s wieners and buns! This is a fun and simple way of having a delicious Hot Dog at any time you wish. This toaster can make two Hot Dogs at the same time.
The Hot Diggity Dogger comes with an electronic time control, so you can adjust the heat to barbeque the Hot Dog’s wieners and the warm the buns in the way you like them best. The wiener basket can be easily removed to help cleaning, as does the crumb tray. The vertical toasting will give you a healthier Hot Dog, at least according to the company. 😀